


Jack, When You Were Mine

by gwyllion



Category: Brokeback Mountain (2005)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-07-13
Updated: 2009-07-13
Packaged: 2017-11-26 03:56:11
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,847
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/646296
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gwyllion/pseuds/gwyllion





	Jack, When You Were Mine

When I first moved to Lightning Flat, Mrs. Doherty assigned me the seat in front of you for our English class. Your long legs stretched from your chair to mine, your feet hooked around the lowest wooden rung. You looked me over with your blue eyes, more pale than your threadbare jeans, your raven hair shiny in the sunlight that struck through holes and broken creases in the tattered shades. That first day, I begged you to stop the endless motion of your right foot, jiggling your boot heel up and down like the needle on my mama’s sewing machine, vibrating my chair so I couldn’t concentrate. You just curled your lips into a smile and blew a stream of grass-scented breath between my braids, making me laugh and squirm. You never knew the right answers to any of the teacher’s questions, but you were never embarrassed to blurt out a smart aleck remark instead, making everyone in the room laugh at you, or pity you for the trouble you were going to cause for yourself. With you behind me, your voice in my ears before anyone else’s, I would laugh first and loudest. Avoiding Mrs. Doherty’s gaze, you and I were guilty, more often than not, of being the cause of disruption to our more studious eighth grade classmates. There was nothing that could be done about it, since my last name started with a T, and we were organized by our names, and the teacher would never consider violating the unwritten rules indicated by the alphabetical seating chart. She invariably called either of us to the blackboard for our punishment, daring us to make the metal tines of the chalk holder draw a triple straight line across the horizon, so we could practice writing cursive. You told me you liked me because any girl who could get in trouble for talking in class as much as you did would be your friend for life. Weeks passed and I felt the scrape of your pencil boring your name into the scarred back of my chair. Only four letters, so you finished your carving after a few days. Later, you showed me your bloody knuckles where the principal struck you with the rattan, one smack for each letter, and I was happy that your name wasn’t William or Jonathan. 

~~~

You talked me into skipping school on a day when summer was in the air, although the calendar showed otherwise. We ditched our books in a patch of scrubby trees by the old pasture path off the highway. You fell running across the meadow, tripping over your feet, coming down hard on your hands, scraping your palms on the flat rocks littered with the broken brown glass of smashed beer bottles left by teenagers who were there years before us. I squinted to keep the bright sun out of my eyes and picked the glass out of your hand, the blood running down your wrist, knowing you were scared about having to lie to your pa, saying that you fell at recess. You wiped your hand on your shirt and it hardly left a mark. I called you a baby for whining about the blood, when a pick-up truck drove by, and the driver would have seen us had we not made ourselves invisible by dropping our bodies flat to the wheatgrass and hunkering down as low as we could without breathing. When we couldn’t see the truck anymore, we ran to the edge of the distant woods where the trees were still green from summer rain. We rolled around in the sunburnt dead grass, pretending we were dogs. Growling, barking, nipping, crawling around on all fours and wrestling, trying to catch each other’s imaginary dog tails, our mouths dripped with slobber. Down at the riverbank we ate our sandwiches and drank warm milk from glass bottles. I dared you to fill your empty bottle with river water and drink it all down, even though little bits of bugs and dirt hung suspended in the wet. You surprised me when you finished the soupy drink without hesitation, draining the bottle dry before smashing it on some rocks near the water’s edge. Before we gathered our books and walked back home at the same time we did every day that we actually went to school, you told me you would give me a nickel if I let you stick your hand up my shirt. At first I said no, but later I let you without making you give me the nickel, since I knew you didn’t have one anyway.

~~~

Sometimes when my parents went into Gillette to run errands, they would leave me at home alone, and you would show up while I practiced my piano lesson. You stretched out on my bed, even though boys weren’t supposed to be allowed in my room. You lit a Marlboro and listened to me play “Drink to Me Only With Thine Eyes,” snickering when I made a mistake and had to start all over again. The green curtains blew inward with each stinging gust of winter wind. Just like boys, smoking wasn’t allowed in my room either, so we had to open the windows, but I doubted my parents would ever discern the smell of cigarettes on my clothes and in the air, since they smoked too. Every so often, you would walk over to me and put the filter between my lips for me to take a drag, although I didn’t really want to. You paced around the room, crazy to be anywhere, or doing anything other than listening to me practice my one boring song. You flung yourself back down on my bed, extinguishing your cigarette in the flowerpot of geraniums, making sure to bury the filter well, because you knew I would be in a lot of trouble if my folks found it left out in the open. When I was tired of messing up the song, you pressed down on all the keys you could reach at the same time with your long fingers and hands bigger than mine, singing a made up song about a cowboy. I slapped your hands away and you decided you were hungry. You went to the kitchen to make us some burnt cheeseburgers because you knew how to cook things if they could be burnt. We ate them with too much ketchup that dripped out between our fingers, with the grease and charred bits, and made a mark on the shag rug that is probably still there in the old house where I used to live in Lightning Flat. 

~~~

When the school year neared its end, there was a dance held for us older kids. I was hoping you would ask me to go, but when you didn’t, I tried to get Bobby Varney to ask me instead. He never did, so you and I were on our own that night when the other kids, who had dates, went to the dance. We sat on your front porch playing cards while mosquitoes landed on our bare arms and we tried to smack them dead, in between hands of the card game. I asked why you didn’t try to find a date for the dance, and you told me you didn’t care about going to stupid shit like that. Then I asked if you ever had sex before, and you told me you hadn’t, but that you hoped you would someday. I asked when you thought someday might be, and you told me at least by the time you turned eighteen, your lashes lowered, covering the only open part into your eyes, so I couldn’t see whether you felt funny about saying that, like I did when I heard your words come out. When it was time for me to walk home, you said you would walk me halfway. Your ma gave you a heavy red flashlight and we took turns carrying it in sweaty summer hands. We weren’t really sure where the halfway point was, so we walked the whole distance of the long lonely road from your house to the main road where the other kid’s parents were driving, either to or from the school, to pick them up from the dance. The way was clear for me then, since I lived in the busy part of downtown, where the headlights and streetlamps could light my way home because I didn’t have a flashlight, or a nice ma like yours, to give me one to hold. 

~~~

One day in the summer, your folks went away to visit your sick uncle, leaving you home to tend the animals. I came over to help you feed them, but you were finished before I got there. We went inside and ate some oatmeal cookies that your ma had made, your hands smelling like the hay you had thrown into the stalls before I arrived. Since there was nothing to do, we decided to play house. I put the dishes away in the foreign cabinets where I couldn’t begin to guess the proper location for the cups and plates. You slapped my face and called me a bitch like your pa does when he hits your ma, and I pretended to care, saying, there, there, it’s alright, kissing your mouth so you would stop yelling at me. We went upstairs and sat on the edge of your narrow bed, beneath the faded picture of that actress who I always forget the name of, or what movie she was in, or why you liked her so much that you would tape her image above your bed to look at when you fell asleep at night. We tried to pretend we were going to make a baby, but your thing was so soft and squishy, it kept folding in half when I tried to get it to go in me, like puzzle pieces when they don’t go together right, and you have to bend a protruding part of the piece back, creasing the cardboard irreparably, to jam it into the place it is not designed to fit. Laughing about it, we gave up after awhile, deciding that we had never done the nasty thing anyway, since it really didn’t go in, and we never bothered to mention it or think about it again. Outside, we took turns sitting on the swing that hung with double rope strands, the cracked wooden seat only big enough for one of us to sit at a time, and even then, really too small for our thirteen year-old asses. When it started to rain, I walked home alone, leaving you on your swing, eventually forgetting the directions for how to get back to your house, even if I had the opportunity to walk down those roads again. 

~~~

My family moved away from Lightning Flat before ninth grade started. This morning, with my husband asleep at my side, I awoke from a dream about when you were mine, and for the first time in fifty years wondered whatever became of you, Jack.


End file.
